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Go and put your hand flat on the wall directly behind your radiator. Not the radiator, the wall. Reach down in there and lay your palm against the plaster.

It is warm.

Now think about what is on the other side. If that is an outside wall, the warmth under your hand is on its way out of your house, and it has been going out every hour the heat has been on, all winter, for as long as you have lived there.

And it is not a leak. There is no gap and no draught. That wall may be perfectly well insulated. The heat is getting into it by a route insulation was never built to stop.

My grandfather showed me with one question. The shop stove was going hard on a January morning and it was still cold to work in, and I was saying we wanted a bigger stove. He took me round behind the stove to the outside wall and had me put my hand flat on the boards. They were hot, so I took my hand off. Then he asked who that wall was keeping warm. On the other side of those boards was the yard.

Heat travels three ways. Through things, carried in air, and as light. You have felt the third your whole life without naming it: stand in front of a fire and your face is hot while your back is cold, in the same room, in the same air. Insulation is built to slow the first two. It does almost nothing about the third, because it is not reflective. Only a bright surface turns that heat back.

What we go through:

Why a dull surface soaks up radiant heat and bright metal sends nearly all of it back Why cold walls make a room feel cold even when the thermometer says otherwise Behind a radiator on an outside wall, and the two details that decide whether it works Why an inside wall is a waste of your time Wood stove heat shields, and why clearances are not optional The attic, and why this is a hot climate job rather than a cold one The one rule that governs all of it: foil only works facing an air gap Why a dusty radiant barrier does very nearly nothing Reflective window film, which is a summer measure and not a winter one The curtain over your radiator, which costs nothing to fix The order to do the work in, and why this one comes last

Said plainly about the size of it: this does not halve your bill. Foil behind your radiators is worth a few percent of your heating, not half. The people who study it put it in tens of dollars a year for an ordinary house. An attic barrier in a hot climate is worth more, and still nothing like half. A few percent for six dollars and twenty minutes is an excellent trade, and it goes on paying every winter. But I will not tell you it changes your bill, because when it does not, you would rightly stop believing the rest of what I say.

And it does not replace insulation. It does the job insulation cannot, and insulation does the job foil cannot.

There is no scheme in any of this, and I say that plainly because you will hear otherwise. Nobody is hiding radiant barriers. They are in the building codes and sold in every hardware store. There is simply no trade in a man taping six dollars of foil behind his own radiator on a Saturday.

Tonight, go round with the heat on and put your hand on the wall behind every radiator. Then go outside and work out which of those walls face the weather.

Tell me in the comments how many of your radiators turned out to be against outside walls. And if you have told me your county before, tell me instead what you heat with.

Next time we go after the heat that simply walks out through gaps you cannot feel, with a lit candle and twenty minutes.

I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com.

The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it.

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